Tel Aviv born Alma Har’el established herself as a music video director after moving to the US and teaming up with Zach Condon (aka Beirut). Now she’s turned filmmaker with Bombay Beach, an intimate, unexpectedly beautiful portrait of the residents of Salton Sea, California. LWLies spoke with Har’el recently about how she discovered this remarkable place and why she was drawn to deconstructing the American dream.
LWLies: It’s a film that really sticks with you, mostly for the fact that you open up this new world, Salton Sea, which a lot of people won’t know even exists. It kind of subverts expectation but at the same time it’s exactly what you expect.
Har’el: Yeah, I know what you mean. That was definitely the way for me too because I didn’t know this place existed either.
So what happened, how did you discover this place?
Accidentally… unless there is such a thing as destiny. I was in Coachella filming a Beirut music video, looking for a location to shoot. Everybody was busy doing press and I was alone with my camera looking for somewhere to shoot the background story. We filmed in LA, supposedly to show where Beirut’s character in the video is from, and a friend of mine said I should go see Salton Sea. What’s funny is I actually lived in a similar place, a little ghost town in Israel in the middle of the desert, for a while. We went there and the first place we stopped at was the marina at Bombay Beach and I was just so haunted by it. It’s so tragic and at the same time just so literally beautiful. There’s all these dead fish and you kind of feel you’re own mortality in a weird sort of way, but then there’s also signs of life all around you.
And then I met Benny and Michael at the beach and I ended up filming the music video with Michael right there and then. I had the costume in the car and filmed Michael as the young Zach [Beirut]. The video’s called Concubine by the way. And when I saw the video I really wanted to show it to them so I drove back there and showed them the video and their reaction was amazing. For a while I’d been wanting to shoot a documentary about dance but using people who were non-dancers, and I just felt such openness from them and excitement about everything we did. Bit by bit I started to learn their story and the complexity of their lives; who they are and how they speak to each other.
How receptive were the rest of the town to you as a stranger coming in with a movie camera?
Incredibly receptive, very open. We just got along right from the beginning and the people were the reason I stayed there and decided to make the movie there. I’d just film whatever they were doing and if they weren’t doing much I’d wait or get ask them to play in the street or go down to the beach. This collection of people gradually built up and the three most intriguing characters became the three central stories in the film. There was something about each one of them that complimented the others, and slowly it became what it is.
The three central characters are so different, and they live in such a close proximity. It seems strange when you focus in on it, but they’re really no different to any group of neighbours.
Yeah, there’s so much more going on than you imagine, and I really focused in on the people I found the most extraordinary. There were so many other people as well, many of them I filmed but for whatever reason they didn’t want me to film them anymore. There were a few ex-cons, meth addicts and pedophiles.
You do get the sense that it’s an end-of-the-line kind of town.
That’s what it is to some people, but to others it’s home. What makes it so special and interesting is the way they interact and live side-by-side. There’s a lot of people there who have no access to proper healthcare and no education, they’re very much victims of their own environment. And then there are others who have just made bad choices in life and found their way to Bombay Beach. But they love it, they have the chance to leave but they don’t want to, they find that feeling of being away from everything… they find some charm in it. It’s a very free place, especially for the children. I grew up in a reality in Tel Aviv that had a lot of love and violence in it, somewhere that at one time had a lot of hope and prospects. As you see from the opening newsreel it’s the same case in Bombay Beach, and I think the reason you have this sense of romanticism about the place is because there’s still a trace of that, and you’re seeing it now through the eyes of children who were born there and who don’t know any different. It’s a survival mechanism to love what you have, so you don’t feel depressed or stuck. When I went there it really made me think about my own childhood.
Do you think that might have added to the sense of romanticism that lingers around the film?
I do but what I was really trying to do was capture the naivety of these people, the innocence. I hope that comes through.
As you mention there’s a prologue which sets up this place as a kind of bittersweet echo of the American dream. Do you feel like that dream still exists for them?
I would say that it’s not so much that it’s the American dream that they hold onto. But I do think these people represent modern America, and they’ve been forgotten in a way. I think one of the greatest things about life is its complexity, and they are as much a part of modern America as anything else; it’s like modern America run riot, with all these medicated children who are basically neglected and marginalised by society. The only thing that’s keeping them alive is the hope that they’re holding onto, and it’s horrible in a way to see it and to know that they probably will never fulfil any of their dreams. When you go to the Parish’s house they have a huge American flag and a dartboard with [Osama] Bin Laden’s face on it. I mean, that’s stronger than anything I could ever verbalise.
Do you feel like perhaps romanticising their way of life allowed you to keep your distance, to not let yourself pity them?
I know there’s a lot of bleakness there, I saw and captured a lot of darkness. I don’t think I avoided any of that, but I tried to focus on the beautiful moments, on the happiness, because that exists their as much as anything else. I feel like I really just tried to capture all of it. Actually, I thought it would be too easy to capture the dirtiness and the poverty, it’s so full of that, but there’s an unexpected beauty that really takes you by surprise. The decay is oddly beautiful there.
Why do you think it’s important that America, and to a larger extent all of us, acknowledge these people?
I don’t know if it is important, but I just want people to see them beyond white trash, inbreds, or whatever. I hope that more people see the film and just open their minds up to these people and their stories.
Alma Har’el (text) by Adam Woodward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
